Dave Grohl has been busy this holiday season: He’s in the midst of a series of Hanukkah covers and Foo Fighters just dropped a rendition of “Run Rudolph Run.” He’s never written a Christmas song of his own, though, and now he has told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe why that’s the case.
Grohl said in a new interview (alongside the rest of Foo Fighters), “Trying to write a new Christmas song, it’s kind of tricky. Because it’s like, you’re so used to the classics. You’re so used to being crotchety. I think we’ve been asked to do it, but I wouldn’t even know what to say. Like, ‘I took mushrooms with the teachers from my school. I took a bunch of mushrooms in my house with my mom.’ I don’t really think it’d work. No, we’ve never even tried. I don’t know if people would want us to do that. I’m not sure. Maybe the day that we decide we don’t want to do this anymore, we make a Christmas song and then we ride off into the sunset.”
That bit about the mushrooms wasn’t just a random funny thing to say; Elsewhere during the conversation, Grohl told a story about the time when he was a teenager and he took some shrooms before a holiday party his mother was hosting:
“I grew up in a house that was really small, and every Christmas night, people just knew to come over to the Grohls’ little house. We would all just sit around and listen to music and drink and stuff like that. By the time I was like 14 or 15, now I’m in a punk rock band, my punk rock friends are coming over. Then my mom’s teacher friends are coming over and then my sister… I mean, we lived in a small little neighborhood and everyone just knew to come over. So this one year… God, I shouldn’t be telling this story. This one year, I think I was like 15 or something like that. My friend gave me mushrooms for Christmas, right? I’d never taken them before. So I thought, ‘OK, I probably shouldn’t take them at this party because all of my mother’s friends are coming over.’ Right? They’re teachers at the school that I go to, I know these people, I’d known [them] for a long time. So my friend gives me all these mushrooms. I think, ‘I’ll take a little bit before the party.’ I was out of my f*cking mind. So much so, one of the teachers from the school pulled me into the bathroom at one point and was like, ‘Are you doing cocaine?’ I was like, ‘No, no!’ So then after everyone left, I stayed up and tried to learn that Zeppelin song, ‘Bron-Y-Aur,’ that acoustic thing, until like six o’clock in the morning. I never figured it out. I thought I figured it out, but I didn’t really figure it out.”
Watch the full interview here.